“What are you talking about? Are you in earnest?”
“It is truly as I have said.”
“Why, this makes me uneasy. Who were chosen, and what was the method? Competitive examination?”
“Indeed, I know naught of the method. I but know this—these officers be all of noble family, and are born—what is it you call it?—chuckleheads.”
“There’s something wrong, Clarence.”
“Comfort yourself, then; for two candidates for a lieutenancy do travel hence with the king—young nobles both—and if you but wait where you are you will hear them questioned.”
“That is news to the purpose. I will get one West Pointer in, anyway. Mount a man and send him to that school with a message; let him kill horses, if necessary, but he must be there before sunset to-night and say—”
“There is no need. I have laid a ground wire to the school. Prithee let me connect you with it.”
It sounded good! In this atmosphere of telephones and lightning communication with distant regions, I was breathing the breath of life again after long suffocation. I realized, then, what a creepy, dull, inanimate horror this land had been to me all these years, and how I had been in such a stifled condition of mind as to have grown used to it almost beyond the power to notice it.